On a conference call this afternoon, Dick Morris predicted a Mitt Romney victory…

Wait, what was that?

…conference call…Dick Morris

Really, isn’t this the point where you consider a more respectable career, like cold-calling widows to steal their Social Security numbers or selling expired baby food?

The sad thing is that the reaction from the wingnut second-stringers and punters when Romney fails to win Pennsylvania and Michigan will be to blame ACORN and the New And More Powerful Than Ever Black Panthers while the people who conned them gleefully cash their fat paychecks.

You can always do some incognito browsing (that’s the Chrome name for it, I think all the browsers have their own word; it’s the version where no enduring cookies or history can be generated), so as to spend their money without permanently skewing the selection of ads presented to you.

Incognito browsing is also a way to read the New York Times for free, or so I’ve heard.

I got robocalls from Anne Romney and Rick Santorum today (to be fair, the call from Anne was a wrong number–there’s no one named Brian here). It’s like saturation bombing–we don’t need no stinkin targets, we have all the money in the world.

We had 7 robo calls today from Romney and the RNC. Seven. On a Saturday. The first coming at 9 freaking AM (on a Saturday) and the last came just after 8:30 PM as I was telling bedtime stories to my son.

7 robo calls. All of them from Republicans urging us to vote. One of them is the same goddamn exact call that we’ve gotten every single day for the last two weeks. To a phone number that hasn’t had a registered Republican at it in well over a decade.

Honestly my only explanation for it is that the Romney campaign decided to pay their robocallers by numbers called per day or something. Because I honestly have never had this many calls from a single campaign ever that I can remember. (We always get a lot of robocalls to our landline during election season but it’s usually different freaking campaigns not one campaign that just calls with the same message over and over and over again – this is really weird.)

you would think, this being the romney/business guy campaign, if those robocallers were getting paid by the numbers dialed, that it would require they be discrete numbers, and that calling the same number repeatedly would garner them no profit.

i mean, supposedly, romney is this whiz bang business genius. paying to have the same number called, repeatedly, wouldn’t seem particularly cost-effective, not to mention, pissing off potential voters.

Grifters gonna grift. Others have noted how St Karl of the massive campaign funding has been pissing other people’s money up a wall. And hell Romney is still paying out massive bonuses to his loser staff.

I personally will be using my share of the Romney ad proceeds to pay for some voter fraud. I’m going old-school of course, using only those with large beards and then shaving them a bit after each time through the polls so they can present themselves as different voters.

Dick Morris is certainly mock-worthy, but he does stand as a living illustration of the gullibility of people on the right. Even the most casual parsing of what he says shows it to be complete bullshit. But I think we now have a solid and substantial body of evidence demonstrating that people who are true rightwing believers simply lack the mental capacity to detect complete bullshit.

The continued employment of Morris is exhibit A. The continued parade of Conservative “thinkers” on the Colbert Report–and all of those “thinkers” believe that Colbert is himself conservative–is both exhibit B and a constant verification of their lack of discernment.

The right-wingers can detect bullshit when they want to. But they believe in the lies and legends of their tribe because they need to believe them. Something in their identity or worldview requires it.

Somewhat relatedly (and somewhat OT, sorry), I visited Unskewed Polls for the first time the other day. Wow. You get the impression these sites are created for people who don’t really know how the internet works, or how a well-designed site should look. The sort of ad on the site is also a pretty good indicator of what sort of IQ and “spending power” is visiting — i.e. people who will believe anything.

I’m also tickled whenever I accidentally click the page at The Corner and a Internet Poker spam page pops up. They act erudite (or some approximation of it) and beg their readers for cash but clearly additional money can be made off people who visit for a dose of Michael Walsh’s august wisdom and discover in the process “WOW, I can GAMBLE online!!!”

As long as we’re lovin’ the 90s here, can I point out that there’s no way Obama would have a chance at winning this thing if not for those illegal fundraising calls from the White House, combined with his rental of the Lincoln Bedroom for Washington Redskins football weekends?

Dang, I wish. I totally would support the ‘Skins if that was their name. And I say that as a girl who grew up right outside of Baltimore and still bears a grudge over the 12 years we were forced by the NFL to watch the Redskins after the Colts left town.

Take this NRO hit on the NBC/WSJ/Marist polls in Ohio and Florida today.

Ohio shows Obama +6 and above 50 percent. Ooh, ouch. That kinda stings, three days before the election, huh? But wait: the poll shows Democrats with a nine-point turnout advantage over Republicans. Inconceivable, says Jordan! Why, in the wave election of 2008, Democrats only held a five-point edge over Republicans. Are these fraudulent, traitorous pollsters telling us that Obama will “almost double” his margin? It is to laugh!

But, hold on now. Something’s a little odd here. Jordan tells us the difference, but he doesn’t tell us the actual figures–that is, what percentage of the electorate is expected to be Democrats vs. what percentage Republicans. I’ll go ahead and tell you–Marist’s party ID figures (page 9) are 38 D, 29 R, 32 I.

And how does that compare to the (entirely infallible, just by the way) exit polls from Ohio in 2008? Well, that year, turnout was… 39 D, 31 R, 30 I.

But second, what this seems to show is that both parties have sloughed off a bit of their support into “Independents,” who presumably have continued to vote more or less the same way they did before. Nationally, it looks like this has affected the GOP more. Basically, a bunch of Republicans now want to say they’re Tea Partiers or Severe Conservatives or whatever. And basically none of these poll truthers seem to have engaged with this evidence, which would fully account for seemingly weird party ID splits. (It would also account for why Rasmussen, which does weight by party ID, is so far from consensus.)

I think I’m done worrying that this people have any special insight into polling bias. This thing is Obama’s to lose.

Can’t we just be generous and assume that, as no-one is so monumentally stupid to call into a conference call in order to receive the wisdom of Dick Morris, Dick Morris simply called into someone else’s conference call, and was able to make himself heard?

Or maybe it’s someone else named Richard Morris. There have got to be a bunch of them, they’re common names. And the political judgment of the average Richard Morris would surely be an imprtovement on that of the famous Dick Morris.

Annie came from New Cannan, C.N.A.
Hitch-hiked her way across the USA
Plucked her eyebrows on the way
Shaved her legs and then he was a she
She says, Hey babe
Take a walk on the wild side
She said, Hey honey
Take a walk on the wild side